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Music Reaction Videos are a Thing
File under: “Nobody predicted this”.
So very recently an almost 40 year old song hit #2 on the Apple iTunes charts. What was the song and why?
Well, two young brothers posted a YouTube video of their reaction to hearing Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” for the first time. They were a little surprised to hear the point where the drums come in, and their video went viral; currently well over 6 million views. And this boosted interest in the Phil Collins song.
So music reaction videos are a thing. Folks set up a YouTube channel where they film themselves listening to a song for the first time and reacting to it. Viewers subscribe to the channel and make song suggestions, and apparently there’s some ad revenue involved. And it’s a way to promote songs.
So what’s happening here? A couple of things…
The music industry hasn’t really had a business model for a few decades. (I don’t consider “fraction of a penny per megabyte” streaming to be a valid business model.) Before the mid ’80s, radio stations would curate, present, and promote songs, and record sales would follow. And that worked pretty well. In the ’80s, MTV took that job over, at least for a couple of genres. And it’s been messy ever since.
While it sure had its faults, the earlier radio-and-record-based business model matched the cultural, artistic, social, market, and human nature needs pretty well. And much of that has been missing since.
So I think the reaction videos are addressing the need to say, “Hey, check this out, lemme play something for you”.
But there’s something else; modern popular music is, for the most part, really awful. Sure, it’s easy to dismiss an older guy whining about “you kids with your lousy music”. But by any objective measure, the songs on the charts are not very musical; in terms of melody, chord changes, theme and variations, lyrics, arrangements, beauty, craft, creativity, sophistication, playing skill, and so on.
So the reaction videos are folks hearing examples of this sort of musicianship for the first time.
Sometime last year I started enjoying a specific genre I’ll call “Black people hearing Pink Floyd for the First Time”. And if you do a YouTube search for “Pink Floyd reaction”, well, that’s what you see.
My favorite Pink Floyd song is “The Great Gig in the Sky”.
Modern popular music is also compartmentalized into very restrictive genres. In the ’60s and ’70s, exploring combinations of genres was itself a form of creative expression.
And while music used to bring the races together in wonderful ways, as the left has weaponized racism, music has suffered.
So I guess there’s this new genre I call “Black People Hearing Black Music for the First Time”. I kid, but this reaction to Living Color’s “Cult of Personality” is priceless:
Published in General
Conservative’s Conservative.^
Since the advent of the iPod, and accelerated by the use of Spotify on home computers, people are spending less and less time listening to music together. Moreover, people are inventing microgenres as fast as the internet can name them.
He is a national treasure.
Jazz ftw! You like the best stuff, too!
Some of it is doubtless theater. But reality shows are totally real, though.
I sometimes delve into modern history, such as the Eighteenth Century.
I went through that phase… now I’m back into blues and jazz. Lol…
There was a time when I liked Jethro Tull, then not really, then a LOT and now, notsomuch.
Thick as a brick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jethro_Tull_(agriculturist)
The Sackbutt Sisters say ‘hi’.
I’ve even been known to play some Theolonious Monk on the harp every once in a while.
I’m having trouble aurally picturing that.
Pretty much anything you can play on a piano you can play on a harp, provided the harp has pedals and a good scale range. It’s different, but not bad. I play classical music most of the time (still my first love, especially 18th century stuff like Corelli), but jazz harp is fun.
Further to this, in the ’40s there was one radio and or record player in the house. Mostly dad chose.
The ’50s added phonographs to teen rooms and radios to cars, the ’60s and ’70s gave us highly portable radios and tape recorders, the ’80s pre-recorded cassettes and (a throwback to shared music) the ‘boom box’. And the advent of CDs. Then we get pirated digital music and genre explosions. The thing with spotify is that we make personally curated lists (with the help of beneficent computers algorithms which would never, ever have nefarious purposes) that we might not want to share with others, lest our metal head friends learn of our weakness for Early Brittney Spears before we announce it on some viral facebook request for ‘what’s the most embarrassing song you still listen too?’
Lost In Vegas is a good music reaction channel I e been watching for a few years. Their reactions and opinions seem genuine, as is their appreciation and also their negative reactions.
I was literally reading through the comments just to see if anybody else had mentioned them. Good timing!
Some of the best reactions of all come from people watching ‘Pisces’ by ‘Jinjer’ for the first time:
The video by itself:
the Lost in Vegas reaction:
So, have you heard about this guy named Crosby…
Ok. I will see myself out now.
It is amazing to me how much the technology drives the music and its popularity. You know who was a superstar in recorded music 100 years ago? John Phillip Sousa. Or at least the band was. He wouldn’t direct on recording sessions because he hated “canned music,” telling Congress:
But the band was loud and loud was king in acoustic recording.
Then came the mic and the age of the singer. The AFM strikes against the technology of radio and recordings helped kill the big bands. Television killed radio and gave rise to the disc jockey. The songwriters gave way to the singer/songwriters.
Reaction to a really good performance of Grand Funk’s “Inside Looking Out”:
Funny but what has that to do with a chocolate bar? Seems like Madison Ave has lost something in the ability to communicate the worth of a product, at least to me it seems so.
Another good one. I like how this guy expresses his thoughts, etc., and tries to figure it out as he goes along.
Someone should introduce these guys to King’s X. You can’t get more American than a black-Chinese dude with a mohawk singing and playing bass with a couple white guys in Texas in a band that blends melodic metal and gospel harmonies.
One thing I used to do that
aggravatededucated my daughters was when I would overhear a song they were listening to, then explain to them how it was one made in the 70s. Then I’d grab my CD andmakehave them listen to the original song. In almost every case, they would still prefer the modern version because it was how they heard the song for the first time, and they liked it.OTOH, I started liking Liz Phair when I overheard one daughter play “Extraordinary.” Great song . . .
Wait . . . this makes Ol’ Blue Eyes a rapper!
“What … what is that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Those notes … they are close to the main part of the song, but different.”
“You mean the harmony? The notes in parallel with the melody but off by an interval?”
“Yeah! How long has that been going on?”
This guy is good. He goes over the lack of timbral quality, the lack of diversity (oooh!) among composers, the compression of the loudness in recordings. It’s science.
Millenials, I don’t say your music sucks because I’m old. I say your music sucks because your music sucks. It has sucked for a while, and its suckitude is failing to inspire new musicians. If all there is to your music is a drum machine, some derp playing a two note “hook” over and over, and another derp yammering on and on about his bling and his hoes, that is all you’ll get in the future. Or, God help us, something that is derivative of that.
I didn’t feel old until I read Britanny Spears is 38. That made my old brain hurt . . .
When the Beatles broke up in 1970, not one of them had yet reached the age of 30.
Goodness, @addictionisachoice, this is EXACTLY what I needed to watch on this Monday morning! His facial expressions and the way he rocked back and forth to the music (his shoulders!!!) I couldn’t stop smiling. :)
@blondie, so glad you mentioned Rick Beato. His videos where he breaks down what makes a song great are, well, great. His personal story is pretty compelling, too, about how he got to where he is in the music biz.
I was the only girl who made it through tryouts for my school’s basketball team in 7th and 8th grade, and Rapper’s Delight was the song we played at the beginning of every practice. Still to this day, every time I hear that song I want to grab some tube socks, my Converse, and a basketball. Great memories. :)
I know you say that (in part) in jest, but I think a variation of that is actually a general cultural phenomenon that forms part of the gulf between generations. A friend and I were actually just discussing this yesterday; we like watching (sometimes not very good) Clint Eastwood movies, but it’s always a little shocking for us to see the pre-1990s ones, because for us as a part of the cultural milieu Clint Eastwood has always been old. He was about 70 when we were born, so non-old Clint Eastwood was never something we experienced first hand, and thus seems kind of unreal. Likewise for a band like The Rolling Stones; for my parents they were/are a kind of counter cultural force, while for someone in my age bracket they’re something that’s kind of just been around forever. And that leads to a very different perspective on certain cultural figures and groups between age ranges.
Here’s young Clint Eastwood, and to keep to the theme of the thread, he’s singing, from 1968’s “Paint Your Wagon” (this is a song more likely to make Baby Boomers have a sudden reaction to, as opposed to Millennial or Gen Zers, and the reaction is mouth agape, wondering what the people at Paramount were thinking….)